I received some positive feedback about the 8-month old version of Teluma over the New Year period and went back to play it myself. Having forgotten a lot of the mechanics, it was as close as I could get as the developer to playing it for the first time.

I built the game for a game jam, originally. The time limit made for a lot of minor bugs that I still wanted to fix, but I also some promise in the game's mechanics. I was inspired to do some work on it and consider making it into a full game. I'm sharing the slightly improved version here in order to get feedback from the public as to how they feel about the game.

It's intended to be a stealth/action sci-fi dungeon crawler, where you level down as you go, not up. A lot of the stealth mechanics required aren't yet present, but you will run out of ammo and possibly get swarmed and killed if you go guns-blazing. Sneakiness is encouraged, even in this early version.

Have a play! Leave some feedback!

-Kevin

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Original Post From KevinMurphyGames.com (April 2015)

This game was made in March 2015 (and a bit into April) as part of the Dublin One Game A Month (1GAM)'s challenge. The theme was "Breaking The Rules". That could mean a lot of things. I decided I wanted to take on a project with another person and Rob Reinhardt (who had done some art for MIC's Paintball last month) and together we decided what rules to break.We'd make a roguelike dungeon crawler, but sci fi, real time, and as cover shooter. The cover shooting mechanic didn't get in there (yet anyway) and so it turned into more of a stealth-oriented shooter.

The main rule we decided to break though was to make an anti-rpg. So we'd start as a totally skilled badass, but level down over time, instead of up. XP (or anti XP) would be based on the amount of damage you take and the amount of bullets the enemy fires (so "stress" in essence) but tempered by adrenaline shots.

Fans of Rogue (or now, Pixel Dungeon), in which you had to recover the Amulet of Yendor may decipher the name of our game, "Teluma". Just a little easter egg there, for the time of year that's in it. Another obvious one is the enemy's alert sound. That will be removed when I next work on the project but I decided to leave it in for now. Enjoy, stealth fans!

A lot of similarities with MIC's Paintball can probably be seen here, as parts of the game were built on the same code (AI and shooting mostly), but the biggest new thing I got to try was to procedurally generate ever-changing levels, and get the AI to find paths around it. This was very challenging to do at first but a lot of fun. Now the game will never give you the same level twice (or is extremely unlikely to), which is pretty important for a dungeon-crawler-style game.

Having Rob handle all of the art did free me up to get a bit further with level generation and AI. Still I'd like to have done more and may well come back to this project if people have good things to say about it. All feedback is appreciated though. If you hate the game, please let me know. I'll learn what people aren't into. This is a warts-and-all sort of release, but as with all my games here, it's a prototype full of place-holder art, code, and sound.